Playground

by Richard Powers

a white and orange clownfish half the length of my hand swam into view, followed by another. From the right came a small school of regal tangs, their tails an insane shade of canary-yellow. The dorsal regions of the flattened tangs were swirled with mysterious dark patches that looked like Hebrew letters written by a moving finger. The stripes on the clownfish, too, seemed legible. The clownfish and the tangs swam together in the space between my face and the ceiling, and the markings on their sides as they flippered back and forth formed sentences and paragraphs blinking too quickly for me to read. Soon they were joined by a troop of languid butterflyfish, whose dot-dash markings along their sides translated all the schooling scripture into long strings of Morse. Other fish swam up in formations. Lemonpeels, flame angels, Picasso triggerfish: the colors were like an acid trip. The shapes were even stranger: spadefish and boxfish and pufferfish. The tweezer beaks of forceps fish, their mouths as long as the rest of their bodies. The